The best idea I had last month didn't come from a brainstorm. It didn't come from a brief. It didn't come from staring at a screen until the pixels burned into my retinas and something useful emerged from the exhaustion. It came on a walk. Twenty minutes into a completely aimless loop around the park, halfway through thinking about nothing in particular, it arrived. Fully formed. Clear. Obvious, in the way that the best ideas always feel obvious once you have them.
This keeps happening. Not occasionally - consistently. The walk is where the work happens. The desk is where the work gets executed, but the walk is where the work gets born. And I've started to think this isn't a coincidence or a quirk of how my brain works. I think this is how all brains work. We've just built an entire professional culture around pretending otherwise.
We sit at desks for eight, ten, twelve hours a day. We schedule meetings back to back. We fill every gap with Slack messages and emails and quick checks of the phone. We've built a world where looking busy is more valued than being productive, where screen time is confused with output, where the person who leaves their desk to go for a walk looks less committed than the person who eats a sandwich over their keyboard while refreshing their inbox.
The science of spacing out
There's actual neuroscience behind this and it isn't complicated. Your brain has two modes of operation. There's the focused mode - the one you use when you're actively concentrating on a problem, writing code, reading a brief, trying to make something work. And then there's the diffuse mode - the one that activates when you aren't thinking about anything in particular. Walking, showering, staring out of a window, doing the washing up.
The focused mode is good at applying solutions you already know. It's the execution mode. But the diffuse mode is where your brain makes unexpected connections. It's where it takes all the disparate inputs you've been absorbing - conversations, articles, visual references, half-formed thoughts - and starts connecting them in ways your conscious mind would never have attempted. The diffuse mode is the creative mode. And you can't access it while you're staring at a screen.
This is why the shower epiphany is a cliche. It's a cliche because it is real. Your brain was working on the problem the whole time - you just had to get out of its way. The walk does the same thing, except better, because the walk adds movement. And movement, it turns out, is fuel for the diffuse network. The physical act of putting one foot in front of the other seems to lubricate the machinery of creative thought.
What the walk actually solves
I've started categorising the types of problems that walking solves. There are the stuck problems - the ones where you've been going round in circles at your desk for an hour and nothing is working. A twenty-minute walk almost always unsticks them. Not because walking is magic but because the problem was never about effort. It was about perspective. You were too close. The walk gives you distance.
Then there are the framing problems - the ones where you have all the pieces but can't see how they fit together. Strategy work is full of these. You have the research, the data, the insights, the audience understanding, but the story that ties it all together won't come. These problems need the diffuse mode more than any other. They need your brain to wander freely through the pieces until it finds the shape they make together. That almost never happens at a desk.
And then there are the taste problems - the ones where something is technically fine but doesn't feel right. The design that works but lacks personality. The product feature that's functional but joyless. The piece of writing that says the right things but doesn't sing. These are the hardest problems to solve consciously because they aren't logical problems. They're aesthetic problems. And aesthetic judgment lives in the same part of your brain that the walk unlocks.
The professional walking habit
I've turned walking into a professional tool. Not exercise walking - thinking walking. There is a difference. Exercise walking has a destination, a pace, a goal. Thinking walking has none of these things. Thinking walking is deliberately aimless. You leave your phone in your pocket. You don't listen to a podcast. You don't have a route. You just walk, and you let your brain do whatever it wants to do.
The resistance to this is entirely cultural. In advertising, in strategy, in any creative profession, there's an unspoken rule that you should be visibly working at all times. Leaving the office to walk around the block looks like slacking off. Taking thirty minutes away from your screen in the middle of a deadline looks like you don't care enough. The entire reward system is built around visible effort rather than invisible thinking.
But the results speak for themselves. Every strategy framework I'm proud of was shaped on a walk. Every design decision I feel genuinely good about crystallised while I was moving, not while I was sitting. Every product idea that turned into something real started as a half-thought on a Tuesday afternoon walk that I probably shouldn't have taken because there was a deck due.
Close the laptop
Here's my walk test, and it is simple. If you've been working on something for more than an hour and you aren't making progress, close the laptop. Don't switch to another task. Don't open Twitter. Don't check your email. Close the laptop, put your shoes on, and walk out the door with nothing in your hands and nothing in your ears.
Walk for twenty minutes. Don't try to solve the problem. Don't try to think about anything specific. Let your mind drift to whatever it drifts to. If it drifts to the problem, fine. If it drifts to what you're having for dinner, fine. The point is to stop forcing and start floating.
Then come back and sit down. Nine times out of ten, the answer is there. Not because the walk is magic. Because the walk removed the only thing that was blocking the answer: you, trying too hard, too close to the screen, too deep in the details, too focused to see the obvious thing sitting right in front of you.
The irony of writing this at a desk isn't lost on me. But the structure of this piece - the framing, the argument, the conclusion - came together on a walk through the park last Thursday. I sat down knowing what I wanted to say. The walk told me how to say it. That's the walk test in action. The screen is for execution. The pavement is for ideas. We've had this backwards for decades, and the people who figure it out first will always outthink the people who just outwork.
